General – Page 10 – Ciaran Laval

August 2, 2013

Are Yahoo/Flickr Trolling Their Members?

I was reading the Flickr forums the other week when I saw a comment along the lines of “I think Yahoo are just trolling us now“, which made me laugh. However I’m now starting to think that the comment is squarely in the “Many a true word said in jest” category.

There has been much criticism of the new Flickr design from users, tech bloggers heaped praise on it but the comments from users tell a different story. Two quick examples of this, The Torygraph ran an article about the great new revamped Flickr, and below the line you see Flickr users disagreeing about the new awesome, with comments such as: “Check out the 139 pages of mostly negative comments on the changes on Flickr’s help pages. This isn’t an improvement. It’s a downgrade.”

There’s a similar pattern from The Grauniad article on the new Flickr, where we see comments like this: “It’s a terrible change. I used to be able to carefully curate my beautiful photostream, now it’s just a mass of photos. All the descriptions have gone too. I think Yahoo have made a big mistake. It’s like they don’t *get* Flickr.”

So Yahoo/Flickr have somehow done something political parties crave, they’ve united the right (Torygraph) and left (Grauniad), I suppose they deserve some sort of credit for that! The Flickr forums have heated up again this week, because not content with unleashing the new awesome on photostreams, search and explore, they’ve now hit groups. Some people who were all “Neener Neener” when people complained about the redesign have now had the penny firmly drop, because they largely use groups so put the complaints down as whining, but now they see the new awesome in all its glory.

The problem with the new Flickr is one that should ring a bell with Second Life users. Sometimes we land in a sim and it’s busy, we see grey people, it’s slow. One of the factors for this can be too many large sized textures loading, Linden Lab even have a page on texture usage that explains the problem. So when Flickr started serving up larger images, I was not surprised to see people complaining they were seeing grey boxes!

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July 12, 2013July 14, 2013

From Here To Ipernity

I’ve decided to open an account on Ipernity, which is a photo sharing site similar to Flickr. I’ve decided to do this because quite frankly I feel that Yahoo/Flickr have lost the plot. I say this with rather a heavy heart because I’ve long loved Flickr, but the justified only views really are irritating and the fact that they are removing choice to view streams in different sizes all over the site, including the new groups system, is beyond baffling.

The worst thing about the new groups is that initially, you could view group pools in small, medium, large, justified etc. They inherited your last setting from the old group system, but Flickr deemed this a bug and rectified it so that justified is the only view. Flickr have also now decided they are working on counting photo views based on a viewers intent ….. I’m not making this up!

Now I’d joined Ipernity a few weeks ago, uploaded a few screenshots but I was a tad wary as to whether they really approved of Second Life type images. This week I contacted their support and after showing them a couple of example snapshots they said that sort of content is fine, as long as it’s not inappropriate, I take that to mean no boobies, which is fine for me as I don’t snapshot them!

Anyway Ipernity isn’t Flickr, it doesn’t have as many users as Flickr, but it does have a nice simple to use interface. If you want the full kit and caboodle you’ll have to pay and this means joining the club, UK rates are:

3 months -£5.49
12 months – £19.99
24 months -£34.99

Now this is slightly more expensive than Flickr pro, but it’s a lot less than the new Flickr Ad Free option. One point to note is that embed codes aren’t available for free members, so for bloggers, it’s a bit of a pain but club members get embed codes apparently.

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June 18, 2013

The Flickr FIC?

The greatest trick the FIC ever pulled was convincing the world they didn’t exist.

The controversy over the Flickr redesign has revealed some very FIC like behaviour, that is if you believe the FIC exist. A discussion on what exactly the Feted Inner Core means can be found here at SLUniverse.

One of the feedback threads on the new redesign got a bit messy with accusations of paid shills and Flickr staff alts posting supportive feedback, you see this sort of thing happens on all forums and Flickr and Second Life forums are rather tame compared to other places, but wild conspiracy theories can rear their heads on both forums. As things got heated, Flickr staff updated the main post with:

“Since a select few in this thread seem to be having a tinfoil hat day, I want to emphasize that all posts by Flickr staff are clearly identified as such by a gray background and the staff tag underneath the buddy icon.

Flickr staff does not use alter egos to post. Even if there are many knowledgeable Flickr members that are willing to help by responding to questions and feedback, none of them are “Flickr staff in disguise”. Please treat each other respectfully.”

Some took umbrage at the tinfoil hat swipe, personally I found it amusing and if people are going to give Flickr stick over the redesign it’s only fair that Flickr staff can poke back at times. That should have been that, but a twist emerged when pictures emerged from a Flickr meetup in San Francisco, just prior to the rollout of the new site. Some of the most vociferous supporters of the changes are seen in the pictures….. oooh!

However that’s not all, some of them were certainly there by invitation from Flickr, although there’s no suggestion that Flickr paid for the trip.

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June 7, 2013June 7, 2013

Are Flickr Going For Tumblr Intergration?

I’m still using Flickr, despite my serious reservations about the new design, which I think is quite frankly awful. I’m not complaining about change for the sake of it, the new Flickr landing page for signed in accounts is full of too much noise and only offers the justified view. Despite performance improvements, large images and infinite style scrolling are bandiwidth and RAM hogs.

However Flickr is still a good place for storing images and groups are pretty much the same as they ever were, with a variety of views available. The way groups work should be the norm, not the exception. However Flickr, despite the howls of protest from users, have steadfastly refused to allow people to customise their views on the landing page, or when they explore. Why? I have no idea but I’m going to speculate that it’s part of a longer term plan to intergrate with Tumblr, because the idea that they’re annoying so many users just to implement adverts holds little water, if they haven’t got website designers who can incorporate adverts into different views, they should hire some who can. I believe their staff are more than capable of serving adverts in different views.

So my guess is that there is going to be some intergration with Tumblr. Coincidentally enough Tumblr’s homepage has had a revamp this week and one that, according to Mashable’s Samantha Murphy is : “a photo-rich design very reminiscent of its new sister site Flickr”

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June 3, 2013June 3, 2013

Tips To Ease The Flickr Pain

There’s a hefty thread on the Flickr forums regarding feedback on the new Flickr, you can see it here. I’m sorely tempted to point them in the direction of the Texture Usage Page on the Second Life Wiki for tips on how to optimise their site! The reason people are having performance issues is due to loading lots of large textures.

Anyway amongst the complaints and allegations that even in beta the feedback was negative, there are some tips on how to ease the pain. When it comes to groups this is easy because you have a user preference on how you view the page. However for photostreams you need to type after the URL. I’ll use Strawberry Singh’s photostream as an example because it’s an excellent stream to view.

New annoying Flickr link to the awesome photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/

Now to make that less taxing, all I need to do is add ?details=1 after the last slash in the URL so:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberrysingh/?details=1

Now I can view it at my leisure and there’s pagination instead of the silly endless scrolling.

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